SATURDAY NIGHT SKY SHOW: When the sun goes down on Saturday night, step outside and look southwest. Venus and the slender crescent Moon will be beautifully close together in the constellation Capricorn. If you can, catch them before the sky fades to black. The sight of a Venus-Mooon conjunction framed by twilight blue is out of this world: Sky map.
'RING OF FIRE' SOLAR ECLIPSE: Yesterday, Dec. 26th, the Moon passed in front of the sun, transforming the Middle Eastern sun into a "ring of fire." Shahrin Ahmad sends this photo of the eclipsed sun from Ras AlRuwais, Oman:
"It was very cloudy," says Ahmad. "This was an extremely lucky shot through a brief gap in the cloud cover. The 'ring of fire' was amazing!"
The eclipse was widely visible from the Indian-Asian side of Earth. Unlike a total eclipse, which reveals the sun's ghostly corona, this eclipse was annular. The Moon on Dec. 26th was just a little too small to cover the entire solar disk. At maximum, only 97% of the sun's surface was eclipsed, leaving a bright annulus visible around the edge of the Moon--a.k.a., the "ring of fire."
Before the ring was fully developed, Peter Aniol also in Oman, witnessed a very strange sunrise as the partially eclipsed sun emerged from the waves of the Arabian Sea:
Temperature gradients in the air above the sea surface refracted and bent the rays of the rising sun, distorting the crescent shape of the 30%-eclipsed solar disk. At one point, a horn of the crescent seemed to pinch off and leave the rest of the sun behind. "It was a once-in-a-lifetime sunrise," says Aniol.
Photos are still pouring in from the eclipse zone. Check them out.
Realtime Solar Eclipse Photo Gallery
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ZEN ASTRONAUT AT THE EDGE OF SPACE: Are the holidays stressing you out? Find your zen ... at the edge of space. On Dec. 2nd, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched a cosmic ray balloon to the stratosphere. This meditating spaceman pendant went along for the ride:
You can have one for $79.95. They make great gifts for space fans and are guaranteed to soothe holiday stress. Each premium stainless steel pendant comes with a greeting card showing the astronaut in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space and back again.
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